Fiction

Murder, a housewife caught up in the middle of it, police, foul play, dastardly plot…those seem to be the ingredients of a typical run of the mill thriller, don’t they? Well, they are all there in The Reluctant Detective. But the book is anything but run of the mill. Nay, this is not a book…

When you think of books about zombies and the undead, the last thing you expect is reportage. If there are zombies and dead men walking, there should be ancient curses, shamans, innocent victims, and swaggering heroes saving the day, right? The answer would be “yes” in most cases. Which is why Max Brooks’ World War…

Yes, the man who moved the world with books like The Kite Runner and A Thousand Suns is back. It might not have been accompanied by the kind of marketing hype that marked Dant…oops…Dan Brown’s Inferno, but Khaled Hosseini’s third novel, And The Mountains Echoed has arrived in bookstores around the world. Does it live…

As we head into the weekend, here is our list of ten books that are worth getting your reading teeth into. They will remain stuck there for a while, we promise. As usual, our selection goes across genres and focuses on entertaining reading rather than the educational (we really believe we had an overdose of…

If you are the type that likes to collect good quotations – and many book lovers do – a Terry Pratchett book can be a treasure of sorts. Never short of wit and possessing the ability to be profound without being complicated, Pratchett’s books come laced with lines that you can quote aloud or just…

It has been exactly a week since Dan Brown released his latest Robert Langdon book, Inferno, and the reviews are almost all in (including our own ). So if you are still wondering whether Dan Brown has pulled off yet another winner with his usual blend of historical fact and thrilling fiction, here are some…

Dan Brown may have achieved fame – and multimillion copy sales – with his ability to blend ancient and modern conspiracies and puzzles, but he is by no means the only author to have done so. There are have been writers before him who have tried a similar approach, using conspiracy theories, myth and popular…

Robert Langdon’s back. Yes, the Harvard University Professor of religious iconology and symbiology, who has a knack of stumbling across ancient mysteries with modern repercussions is with us again. And after tackling the Illuminati, Da Vinci, and the Freemasons, he now takes on a foe who draws inspiration from one of literature’s greatest works, Dante…

Thrillers come in many forms. Some have you riveted from the first page. Some stutter from event to event. And some – some very rare ones, alas – suck you into them, leaving your mind in a whirl when you have ended. Gone Girl falls right into the third category. It is a thriller, yes,…

Amish Tripathi’s conclusion of his Shiva trilogy has been one of the most discussed books of the year. But does it live up to the hype surrounding it? Well, Bookwag’s own review of The Oath of the Vayuputras will be up shortly. But in the meantime, some reviews of the book have been coming in and…